Pure Near-Final Preview

Share.

We take the almost-finished version of Disney's off-road epic for one last test drive.

By Martin Robinson

It's an eerily quiet office we're met with when we visit Black Rock's Brighton studios, located on the coastal resort's seafront and sitting conveniently opposite two of the city's sadly dwindling arcades. With Pure -- its first effort in its new partnership with Disney and what's looking to be a surprise hit when it's released later this month -- in the bag, the numbers in the offices are understandably thin, while those left to man the fort are nursing some severe hangovers as they get some well earned respite after 18 months solid work on the ATV racer.

With the demo having just gone live on both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 -- and catching many unawares with its sheer quality -- it's a time for consolidation for the team as it sees its first game under the Disney umbrella out of the door. "You get the blues," says the game's director Jason Avent about saying farewell to Pure, "something that's filled your life and you love has kind of gone away."

Not that the team are feeling melancholy at all, who are justifiably proud of their efforts. More importantly, the game's passed the ultimate test; having spent close to two years labouring away at Pure, they're still eager to play the game. "Normally at this point in the dev cycle, where you've been doing something for 18 or 24 months, you feel a little bit jaded," says Black Rock's Chris Bowles. "You've done everything there is to do and you want to get it out of the door and get on with the next thing but we still have a load of fun playing the game every day."

"The IT guy plays it," chips in Avent, "and he's never really played any of our games. If you leave it on in the boardroom he's always sitting there playing it."

The team formerly known as Climax Racing, Black Rock Studios is built on the most solid of foundations. Known primarily in the UK for its work on the good Moto GP games that hit both generations of Xbox, its perhaps best known in the US for its work on the ATV Offroad series. Taking up the mantle from Rainbow Studio's first two games, Climax Racing worked against the weight of expectation and managed to produce two fine games.

But despite Black Rock's heady heritage, we'll admit to being indifferent to Pure when it was first unveiled. On its surface it's another in a long line of extreme sports games, so our first reaction was to draw lazy and slightly unfair parallels to MotorStorm -- a frequently made comparison that wrangles with Avent. "It's difficult because we're the underdog. We read the forums, we listen to what people are saying and it's annoying -- it's a completely different game, a completely different proposition. Our game's about leaping off cliffs, their game is about falling off cliffs."

One other frequently made observation that the team is happier to court, however, is to SSX, EA's fondly remembered PlayStation 2 snowboarding title. "The funny thing is we didn't set out to do a game like SSX, it just evolved like that," says Avent. But the comparison recurs, and it's one that sticks. "The SSX thing is the greatest compliment this game could have," enthuses Bowles. "I was a massive SSX fan and there are people who pick up Pure and the vibe they get from the game reminds them of SSX. I think it's really useful as a tool to get preconceptions out of people's heads."

With its races taking place in some spectacular and often stomach-churning locales, Pure is a bare-knuckled arcade racer that shuns reality in pursuit of thrills. No better are these typified than when reaching the peak of a mountain and engaging in a freefall some hundreds of feet, which instills a genuine sense of excitement as epic as the vistas around you. You barely have time to take it all in though, because while you're in mid-air you need to be busting out as many tricks as possible.

Though it's been taken to an extreme, these moments were born from director Avent's love of off-road mountain biking. "I was describing what it feels like doing mountain biking, when you're pedalling up a hill," he says. "You go up and up and after about an hour you break through the trees and get into heather and then something happens -- you come around the corner and suddenly you've got this massive vista of mountains in front of you. It usually happens at the point where you're going really fast, and at the same time as you go 'wow' you scare yourself because your bravery outstrips your ability and you nearly fall off the mountain. That's what we wanted to capture."